I find
myself now, in what are likely my December years, more impatient and
less receptive. I have enough experience and intelligence to
recognize what is working, and will work, but not enough of either to
design and manufacture, especially manufacture, new workable machinery from scratch. I am then a bellwether, but one with a
sharp sense for danger, and a good salesman's gift for reading body
language.

Via Gerard
I just read Michael David Cobb Bowen's essay Collapsing
with the Swiftness, and then The
Peasant Principle, (so I could find out what the "slice" is). Then I read Collapsing again. My sense is
that Cobb has the qualities I lack, but is himself about to get out of
Dodge for some geek Hole-in-the-Wall. The danger thing.
My further sense is that it's all out of my hands. I find no
peace in that, but have a better understanding of the forces at
work. I excerpted below, but the full text is richer, and
of course more cohesive.

“

Only
peasants care about America. Those who are wealthy find it merely
convenient. But there is a slice somewhere in the connection between
that make this place extraordinary. Long live the Slice. [...]

The Slice is smaller, much smaller than the middle class. I believe it
to be smaller than the upper middle class. Indeed it is a small subset
of the rich and near rich. They are the people who work because they
know how and because they want to, but most importantly, they enable
the institutions of power.[...]
American exceptionalism depends uniquely on the persistence of the
Slice, those capable of and desirous of maintaining a highly competent
meritocracy. The rest of us are peasants. [The
Peasant Principle]

There has basically only been one idea circulating in
my
head over this matter of Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia, which is the speed
at which collapse occurs. [...]
So how many years will it take for anything to collapse? It never takes
years, it only takes years of neglect bu the collapsing comes swiftly,
like a thief in the night. Either you are or you are not prepared.

The only people who seem to be prepared for the future are those people
who have none. [...] like the lunatics
in Egypt. Yeah, they're lunatics. They are the same lunatics that were
in Iran a couple months ago. Only the people with no future are out
there trying to make one just by showing up, yelling at police,
throwing rocks, taking pictures, turning a car over, burning a
building, dragging a dead body from the middle of the road. That seems
to be all that ever happens. What would you do? I think I'd buy my guns
and ammo ahead of time, get my shortwave transceiver hooked up, find
some ex-military guys, get my women out of town. [...]
It always comes down to the Slice doesn't it? What level of outrage the
military officers, engineers, doctors and literates can tolerate.
Everybody else goes, more or less, with the flow - where the bullets
are flying away from you, the electricity and painkillers to you.
That's all the masses need to grant political consent. The first rule
of maintaining democracy? Keep the streets clear of garbage. For that,
you need people to work the infrastructure. Egypt uses pigs. Mubarak's
government has been walking on stilts for years. Easy to tip over. [...]

I'm making friends at 2600
and may go to Defcon this year. These are the people who could rebuild
the internet from scratch, who might be found if they could be found,
looting Fry's and building a packet radio network, resurrecting Fido
and policing their IRCs with smarter bots than anybody in the FCC could
possibly understand. I'm getting face-time with them because today it
only costs 12 bucks to buy a pair of 4GB flash chips from Amazon.com.
Tomorrow who knows? [...]
Right now what matters is what the Egyptian Army decides to do. What
the Egyption ISPs decide to do. If they were partners with the American
Systems Administration Force, they guys in the Pentagon would know the
frequencies and codes on their communications systems and
recognize their voices on the air. They could be in confident
contact right now, and the Commander in Chief would be in the loop. But
arrangements would require the presumptions of empire, a presumption
that Barack Obama would never hold.

He believes in natural law, but not that rights are the gift of the
strong. And so he has faith that the lunatics in the streets everywhere
will arrange themselves into the proper queues and that peace will
establish itself. He's a dreamer that Obama and he and his brain dead
hack Secretary of State are sleepwalking through yet another crisis,
like spectators of the NFC playoffs who care more about the commercials
at the Super Bowl than who wins. [Collapsing
with the Swiftness]

Certainly the most
sensational story of the past week, that I have yet to mention, was "Asian-American
lawmakers demand Limbaugh apology." In making his public
protest, California state Sen. Leland Yee exposes another chink
in his character, aside from being a Democrat from San Francisco - a
total lack of humour. Yee's excitement over Limbaugh's delicious
parody imitation of the Chinese language [during a speech made by
Chinese President Hu Jintao] has not unexpectantly unleashed wrath from the
yellow journalism trade. It's a slippery slope to take
seriously the ravings of the perennially aggrieved, like Yee, who would
chop-chop out of the culture anything that displeases them. I'm fed-up
with all this chop suey gobbledy-gook. Give us a
blake arready.

MATTHEWS:
Well, let me ask you about the prospects we’re looking at as
an American. We’re looking at the map of the world right now and where
Egypt sits in the world. It’s so strategically located. It has, of
course, the Nile River. It has, of course, the Panama Canal.